Today's online environment provides users with a variety of ways to share content. For example, a user may maintain a web log (“blog”) that allows a user to post text content and objects with the text content, such as pictures, video, audio, and so on. The text content and an associated object may be published for consumption by the general public, or published for limited access by one or more authorized viewers. Maintaining the security of and control over an object associated with content may be challenging, however. For example, it is typically difficult to control access to an object and to prevent unauthorized access to the object once the object has been published.
Previous techniques for securing and managing access to objects have a number of deficiencies. For example, the techniques are typically enforced at a front-end display layer, and thus make the techniques susceptible to being hacked or compromised if a particular device is compromised. Also, it is typically very difficult to manage or revoke permissions that control access to an object once the object has been published. Thus, if a user inadvertently publishes an object (e.g., a picture) that the user did not intend to publish, it is difficult to “un-publish” the object and prevent further access by users attempting to view the object.